Project Management and team work:
When setting out to do a project such as produce a single for an artist it is easy for a lot of things to go awry. That is why it is so important to set out as soon as possible to find the team you want or think will be ideal for the successful completion of the project. The team ideally needs to creatively and accountably get the work done in an efficient and timely manner. Even before assembling a team together one or more people need to have a vision or the basis of an idea that will later fall into the required guidelines for the project. For this particular project we had one team member who had a background in live sound and stage work/ mixing. One team member had a background in studio recording and mixing. The final team member was our expert on electronic music production and mixing.
One of the issues of grouping together on something like this is availability. Availability of the artist, availability of our production team members and trying to get some dates to align. To minimise the disruption that some unavailabilities would cause we as a group discussed in length what sound we wanted to achieve with the song. We also discussed what artists we had access to and if they had something prepared that they wanted to record and were ready to go that would fit into our ideas for the project. After narrowing down the list we checked all of their availabilities before deciding on our final artist based on his availabilities meeting our needs within the production timeline. A contingency we had in place was to message the other team members on our slack channel we created to keep everyone updated on when things were progressing with the project. If one or more of us could not make it to a edit session for the electronic music production side of the project we were always kept up to date of the progress of the song at the end of each session.
Another issue that arose in our group is the want for the other team members to learn a bit of each others skills which on a more difficult and wider reaching project may have resulted in failure. This is definitely something that slowed production down in the sense that our final product (although all of the team members and the artist was happy with the outcome) could have been more structured and developed then what it was.
My role on the team:
My main role was to help in the recording session. I helped to record vocals and the guitar although Ellery was most comfortable expressing his ideas and creative thoughts with Callum. So we let him have more of the responsibility when dealing directly with the artist. This was due to having a previous history of working together. I also assisted in the comping session to come up with the song structure of the vocal line and match it up with the guitar for the acoustic element of the song. The whole group as a collective was involved in the decision of our final mix of the song. We had about six mixes in total and we all listened to them separately and expressed our thoughts and opinions about each mix. We also let Callum (who was our EMP expert on the project) know what electronic elements he used that we liked and wanted to keep in the song. We also let him know when we didn't like a mix or when the electronic components overpowered the acoustic elements too much as our brief was to have a harmonious balance of acoustic and electronic elements. Our final mix was collectively picked as we felt it was the best version that aligned with our brief.
Project Planning:
The project plan we came up with was very dynamic. Project plan can be found here.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DD0vF4_b5n5RAoe1OCyT9G-CqHW4qiyq/view?usp=sharing
We simply wanted to create an acoustic and electronic balanced song. I feel we stuck very closely to the plan, we had the recording for the acoustic part done and mixed very early on. Then Callum started his EMP process. It was during this process that we deviated from our plan. We only allowed this as we were sticking to the plan exactly and saw that we had 3 weeks to mix and finalise the song. We used this time as an opportunity to learn from Callum tips and tricks about producing electronic components for songs. He went though his process and showed us different ways he finds inspiration to come up with the beat of the song. This was done so we can learn different skills from each other and would be beneficial to future projects that we go on to work on. We only spent one or two sessions during the week (during our classes when we had time to work on our project we used that time to learn about EMP) to have a look deeper at these skills then we went back and focused the last two weeks on making sure that the song would come together in a way we would all be happy with.
Creative work and processes:
We initially had Ellery sing and play the guitar at the same time for the recording, however as he had not had time in a recording studio setting prior to this recording he kept falling out of time either with the vocals and then the guitar. So we ended up recording the vocals and guitar separate and although we used a click track to keep the artist in time we had some slight timing errors to fix in the editing process.
For the recording process we decided to use Protools. We did this as most of our team members know how to record and use the software in a way that would be fast and efficient to record what we needed. After getting all of the recordings we did a comp session to tidy up the structure of the song and to allow us as a group to strategically add the electronic components over the top of the recording in the sections that we wanted. We did a basic mix of the recording before bouncing out the track and loading it into Abelton. From there we went on to edit and add in all of the electronic components.
For the vocals and guitar we used the Rode Nt2-a microphone. We chose this mic as is a versatile microphone and is good to use for vocals as it has a smooth tonal balance across the spectrum. It also sits well to use for acoustic guitar as no matter how far away or how close the guitar is to the microphone there is less chance for distortion of sound due to the technical specifics in the makeup of the microphone.
In working on this particular project I have found that I will need to do an ample amount of research into electronic music production. As it is something I lack knowledge about, Processes, workflow and the like. For future projects I would like to have a bit more knowledge in this area and not just in standard acoustic music production. I would like to do more research in all methods and ways to create music as the goal, no matter if i like the genre or not, is when it comes time to start my label I want to be able to have the knowledge and the skills to be able to showcase and produce anyone who approaches me and vice versa.
Mp3 deliverable of Ellery- Original song.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-J5rPJ7sf0UPTwVDKlLZ4OG0uyrmwZyB/view?usp=sharing
Wav file deliverable of Ellery - Original song.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hk1MEns_tdgbiyu9XHwqDYy4ZBzEi28v/view?usp=sharing
- V.
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